The involved malware infections destroyed the master boot record of the hard drives of the machines attacked. The MBR on a hard drive contains crucial information on how file systems on the drive are organized. The malware involved overwrote data in the MBR with the following string of characters: “PRINCPES, PR!NCPES, HASTATI.” It also overwrote random parts of the file system with the same characters.

After that the system was given a forced reboot command, but because the MBR and file system had been corrupted, it was unable to restart, McAfee said in a blog post today.

Meanwhile, Renesys, the research company that closely monitors the pulse of the Internet, watched the attacks take place, and noticed what appeared to be a smaller, secondary attack against the network in North Korea. “It is impossible to know from connectivity measurements alone whether these outages were the direct result of cyber attacks,” the firm wrote in a corporate blog post. “However, given the recent rhetoric between these two nations, it is hard not to see these as ominous developments on the Korean peninsula.”

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

AllThingsD by Writer

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources. Read more »